[PATCH] Documentation/changes: Raise minimum supported binutils version to 2.23

Borislav Petkov
2020-03-16T16:02:58Z

Long overdue patch, see below.

Plan is to queue it after 5.7-rc1.

---
From: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2020 16:28:36 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] Documentation/changes: Raise minimum supported binutilsa version to 2.23

The currently minimum-supported binutils version 2.21 has the problem of
promoting symbols which are defined outside of a section into absolute.
According to Arvind:

binutils-2.21 and -2.22. An x86-64 defconfig will fail with
Invalid absolute R_X86_64_32S relocation: _etext
and after fixing that one, with
Invalid absolute R_X86_64_32S relocation: __end_of_kernel_reserve

Those two versions of binutils have a bug when it comes to handling
symbols defined outside of a section and binutils 2.23 has the proper
fix, see: https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/binutils/2012-06/msg00155.html

Therefore, up to the fixed version directly, skipping the broken ones.

Currently shipping distros already have the fixed binutils version so
there should be no breakage resulting from this.

For more details about the whole thing, see the thread in Link.

Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200110202349.1881840-1-nivedita@alum.mit.edu
---
Documentation/process/changes.rst | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/process/changes.rst b/Documentation/process/changes.rst
index e47863575917..7a842655142c 100644
--- a/Documentation/process/changes.rst
+++ b/Documentation/process/changes.rst
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ you probably needn't concern yourself with pcmciautils.
====================== =============== ========================================
GNU C 4.6 gcc --version
GNU make 3.81 make --version
-binutils 2.21 ld -v
+binutils 2.23 ld -v
flex 2.5.35 flex --version
bison 2.0 bison --version
util-linux 2.10o fdformat --version
--
2.21.0

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.